Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

He has materialized in the dark empty kitchen doorway of the house. There he is. That hair hangs in his eyes and makes him frown, he always looks as if he’s frowning or puzzled, even when he smiles. His gaze is concentrated by the vertical line between his brows; he dips gracefully, sideways, to touch, once again, a cat that glides away before contact.

The book is in the hand resting on the steering wheel. It’s as if the father has been discovered rather than the son.

— What makes you read this? — There is no use temporizing. Anyway, the words come out as involuntary exclamation, the book might be a ball that has landed in the car.

— I’m curious. Curious to know. — He smiles. He’s pushed back his hair as if to show his face, he’s hesitated, just a moment, giving account of himself, standing there, before opening the door. He heaves the rucksack onto the floor, then gets in.

— Why not on the back seat. -

— It’s okay, doesn’t bother me. This car’s so big in front. You should have seen us squashed into the Von Falkenbergs’ Land-Rover! —

He holds out his hand to relieve the driver of the book that encumbers him and it is given over.

— Doesn’t look very interesting. -

His eyes can’t be seen. The blond head — from the back and side views like the head of a woman, although he isn’t effeminate at all, in face or body — gives the impatient gesture of freeing itself of some trace of ornament. — Quite interesting-He’s leaning awkwardly over the rucksack, trying to find a place for the book more secure than the torn pocket. No — he has been searching, while the car turns out of the yard, the angle pitching him forward towards the instrument panel, he delves, even displacing and repacking a pair of dirty socks that release the sourness of his desert sweat: he produces something.

— I bought it in Windhoek. I thought, for Mummy. —

In the palm of the long hand with the three strands of the snake ring round the third finger (head and tail meet on the other side) is an egg. A semi-precious stone in the shape of an egg.

He will go straight to town once the plane has gone. Which means once he has delivered the passenger to the departure lounge on a full belly of T-bone steak and mushrooms, strawberries and cream, with a newspaper and a ten-rand note (prohibited; school pocket money is restricted to half that) for the journey. He never waits to see take-off; today the observation balconies are filled with families who have come to do so as a Sunday entertainment, watching planes that bring in or carry away no one known to them. He traverses yet again the murmurous reverberating concourse with communicants clutching talismans and holy relics — the bunch of proteas or lapel orchid for exit, the duty-free bottles borne home — and the liturgical announcement of arrivals and departures punctuated by the note of a musical gong, almost as in the similar concourse of one of the great cathedrals of the old world, to which stopover privileges give access, stages of the service are marked by the tinkle of a bell. Past the baggage claim area where this time a party of Indians returned from Mecca are grouped like a theatrical troupe in tinselled regalia, being embraced by weeping relatives. Habitually a face looking out for him, and the conversational ritual that is the ultimate sum of all journeys. — Good trip, sir? Everything all right? — My knees need to straighten out, I had to take tourist class, cramped as all hell — He’s quickly free of the place and racing the engine unnecessarily as he reverses out of his slot in an echelon of cars.

He will be back in town within half-an-hour on the expressway but where the overhanging signs of different exits present him with an alternative he simply glides off, maintaining speed without hesitation, as if that were his intention all along, to the lower lane on the right. That road dives under the highway he has left, literally dodges — it is overhead a moment — the road to town. He’s on the way back to the farm, that’s where he is. The car is making for the farm. It’s done now. These great new roads have no provision for the retracing of steps. Once you’re on course, you’re on; that’s it. So he drives without let or hindrance (as the phrase goes) as one can only on an expressway, without distraction or interruption, a mechanical hare set streaking along its appointed lane of track.

There is the usual sort of Sunday gathering he was expected at — people would begin to turn up only in an hour or so from now, but he remembers the invitation or rather obligation as if it were something he has already missed. Not missed much: the drinks set out beside the swimming-pool in the hope it isn’t really still too chilly in the evenings for a braai, the host (Consolidated Steel Mills and twenty-eight per cent of the reopened platinum mines at Rustenberg) in his ‘Smile’ T-shirt — and who would not, at the sight. Pretty women laugh and hug him, his witty wife explains drily that he stole it out of their teenage son’s drawer, while the hoarse yelling exhortation of rock records provides exciting castigation from another generation, as if some mad prophet were being allowed to carry on raving somewhere in the beautiful garden. The expressway has dumped him in Sunday joy-riding traffic, but soon he is past the location, past the buses and the over-loaded taxis swaying about on their rumps, and set down sweetly on the dust of his own road, the farm road. The dust rises, he is lost in it, it’s kicked up behind him like covers drawn up to the ears. He’s driven straight back to the farm and to hell with it all.

It is still early enough for him to have come out for the first time on a Sunday. The sun’s still high — dropped from its zenith but hung flashing there like a smashed mirror, the last moments of the full of the afternoon. Sometimes when there has been a lunch-party to go to he hasn’t got out until around this time. He might never have been there already, today. The wait, outside the Indian shop, outside the house — the blond head, the toenails, from which the dust shakes off, standing out like eyes in a dirtied face: might never have been at all. A day last half-term — in May, he says it was.

He has the farm to himself. They ignore him, not even Jacobus is to be seen this afternoon. Over at the compound, a kind of swarming in the air, a thickening of sound and activity. It’s in full swing. Every now and then a reek of burning meat, burning offal — not the goat? Already? He goes into the barn; no sign there ever was a goat. Old goat Jacobus. Old devil. One story about a witch-doctor; another story about a sick man. Anyway, they are all at the compound and they ignore him, he can believe what he chooses.

Little dark birds are like snapped fingers in the air. The farm is striped — green of lucerne, blond of old dry grass where it was saved, green of new reeds — even the black of the burning is part of the pleasing composition. He should get someone out to paint it. — And what’s this? One of your country seats? — walking around the flat sizing up; even for one who despises coquetry there has to be some sort of delay before the taking off of clothes.

— A cottage we’ve had for years at Plettenberg Bay. Doesn’t look much like that any more; that whole mountainside’s built up now. -

— All your friends followed you. - Judgement or sympathetic observation? That’s your form of coquetry. But it palls, it’s just like every other novel form of arousal, it would no longer work after a time, my girl, because it’s easy to plot a graph of the reactions of your kind.

I know what you’re thinking.

Yes I know — kill the thing you love, that old saw. But d’you mean my kind does it, or both our kinds — is it a sneer or acknowledgement? Are you like me, or giving me a dig?